This was my home, for heaven and Lorenzo de Medici knew how long.
CHAPTER XVI Captivity
For one reason alone I pass over the next six years in a few words. That is because those six years were empty—heart-breakingly empty.
I was not released from my cell, except for the reason I shall relate. I knew no passage of time except by the shifting of the sunlighted patch on my wall opposite the little window, and by the arrival, each noon, of coarse food in a wooden plate and water in a leather mug. This was the same fare, I make no doubt, as that of the monks who were my jailers.
On Sundays came a cup of wine, and I could hear the intoning of a mass. Then I would make a mark to denote a week's passing under the date which I had scratched in the biggest stone. These weekly marks added into months, and the months into years. I found myself pacing up and down, up and down, like a beast in a cage. To break myself of that frantic habit, I spent hours at calesthenic exercises which did keep me fairly fit, and at sketching with bits of burnt wood, and scratching pictures on the wall with the tongue of my belt-buckle.
My best effort was a Madonna, amusing her haloed Son with a flowery twig. As I worked thus I wondered if the picture would ever be seen by other eyes than mine. I decided that probably it would. The fortress was old, and might last for centuries. I might die in the cell, and another captive replace me, a captive who would look at the work of my hands and muse idly about the predecessor who had wrought thus.
Nobody spoke to me, not even the monk who thrust in my daily ration. And nobody watched me. In the summer of 1474, my second in the cell, I decided that escape was not impossible.
First I detached a leg of my bedstead, and with this as a lever worried the crossbars out of my window. They had been set in mortar, and had sharp points. Stealthily I began to widen the narrow aperture, working each night and restoring the bars by day, lest someone look in from the outside and bring my labors to nought.
After a month I decided my diggings adequate— but they were not. Trying to wriggle through I became jammed in the window tunnel, and there I was forced to stick until a goat-keeper, chasing his charges around the walls, happened to spy my protruding head. It took two muscular friends to drag me back into my cell, and I was marched between them to Father Augustino.
The prior spoke sadly upon my prideful and rebellious nature, urged me to pray for forgiveness and a softer heart, then sentenced me to a term of bread and water—and a flogging. When an attendant came with a knotted bundle of thongs and laid them like burning wires upon my bared back, rage swallowed my reason. A sudden jerk freed my wrists from those who gripped them, and I tackled my flogger, threw him heavily, and clutched his throat with both hands. Half a dozen of the Holy Pilgrims, as ready to battle as to pray, dragged me free before I could damage the whip wielder.
Father Augustino had watched the incident with an appraising light in his single eye.
"You refuse to be corrected," pronounced he, very coldly.
"Keep your lash for slaves!" I retorted passionately. "I will die before I submit!"
To my considerable surprise, he nodded understanding. His eye danced a trifle, and his wide lips smiled, revealing other lean white teeth than the one which showed through the notch.
"Be it so," he granted, in a more human tone. "I remit the flogging. But you must be closer penned. Brethren, put him in the cell below his old one."
They did so. The new prison was smaller, and for bed had only a shelf under the window, spread with musty straw. The window itself was cross-barred and looked out upon a face of hewn rock. This part of the fortress was below ground, and a foot-wide trench was all that gave air and light.
Gloom and closeness were new burdens upon my soul, but I had gained one advantage—the stern approval of the prior. To him I sent request for a lamp and pen and paper. These were given me, and I had surcease from ineffable ennui by writing and drawing. Among other things, I set down in outline most of the story told here in foil. That outline is spread before me as I write these words, and is a check against my irritably failing memory.
I kept up my exercises, too, shadow-boxed on occasion, and incised more pictures upon my wall. Even so, I had many hours in which to meditate upon the injustice of Lorenzo's decree concerning me, and upon the things I would do to Guaracco if I ever came within reach of him. Of Lisa I tried not to think.
In the fall of 1474, and again two years later, attacks were made upon the fortress. There was cannonading from the stronghold, and in reply from ships, and once an effort was made to storm us. I heard commotion, fierce yells, the clash of steel. In the end, I could hear the austere soldiers of the church had repulsed their assailants, and for a day the castle rang with chanted paeans of praise.
I grew to have a philosophic sympathy with my jailers. They acted upon agreement with Lorenzo in imprisoning me. They confined me closely only because they must. If my food was plain, my bed hard, so were theirs. For the rest, they were sincere worshipers and fierce fighters. The world was full of worse people.
Thus I reasoned, but still it was a desperate struggle to remain contented and sane. I tried to remember "The Prisoner of Chillon," which had one or two stanzas of comfort for the captive, but it would not come to mind. In any case, Lord Byron would not write it for a good three hundred and forty years.
The spring of 1477 saw yet another attack by enemies, a stronger and more stubborn effort to carry the Fortress of the Holy Pilgrims. I could hear the battering of a wall close to me, and the overthrow of part of it. So hot was the fight, so narrowly balanced for an hour, that the very jailer monk rushed from the corridor outside my cell to help defend the ramparts. During his absence I had time to do a thing I had long planned to do.
The lamp that lighted me was an iron saucer with a central clip to hold aloft the wick. I ignited the straw of my bed, and, holding one edge of the lamp saucer in a fold of my jerkin, contrived to heat the opposite edge red hot. Then, with a loose stone for a hammer and the bed shelf for an anvil, I pounded, reheated, and pounded again, until I beat that rim into a knifelike edge. After the battle the jailer returned, but he had not heard my noisy labors. And I began to whittle at my wooden door.
The planks were thick, and seasoned almost as hard as iron. But I persevered, all that stifling summer. I counted myself lucky when, between one dawn and the next, I shaved away as much as a handful of splinters.
Boresome it was, and eventually heart-breaking, for my first burrowing brought me to metal. I dug at another place, hoping to avoid such a barrier, but found more; more, that is, of the same sheet.
Eventually I had removed almost all of the door's inner surface, and found myself confronted with a copper plate, a central layer, probably with as much wood outside as I had already disposed of. My tappings and proddings convinced me that it was solidly massy, except for the small slide-covered opening for food.
I am afraid I both cursed and sulked. I had no cutting tools. The blunt-edged piece of glass I used for an occasional shave was far from adequate. Even if I'd had tools—file, chisel, or drill—I would not have dared use them, for the noise would attract guards. What then?
Acid came to mind—sulphuric acid. But where to get it? The stones of my cell were volcanic, might contain sulphides. But how could I burn or distill them? Even if I got the acid, would not its strong odor bring investigation? I approached the problem from another viewpoint, considering not the best acid but the most available.